I Have A Lot Of Stuff. Slowly

I Actually Looked Up In My Journal Trying To Figure Out Some Dates And, In January 1991, America Is About To Go Back Into Its First Sort Of Actual War Since Vietnam, With The Gulf War. It Just Seemed Unbelievable At The Time That This Country Would Do That - Which Is Funny To Think About Now.

Skateboarding Is Not A Hobby. And It Is Not A Sport. Skateboarding Is A Way Of Learning How To Redefine The World Around You. For Most People, When They Saw A Swimming Pool, They Thought, ‘let's Take A Swim.' But I Thought, ‘let's Ride It.' When They Saw The Curb Or A Street, They Would Think About Driving On It. I Would Think About The Texture. I Slowly Developed The Ability To Look At The World Through Totally Different Means.

I Work At A Record Label Where I Have Archives. These Things [memorabilia] Occurred And Are Important To Somebody, And They're Important To Me. I Find The Record Industry Largely Repellent. This Music, The Teen Idles, All Of That Stuff, Is Important To Me. I Don't Have Lawyers, An Agent Or A Manager. However I Find The Music Industry Largely Repellent. I Just Make Records Because That's What I Love To Do. So I Think That Era, Those Pieces Of Media, I Keep In My Collection.

Archiving Is Extremely Expensive And Time Consuming. I'm Sure An Archivist Would Tell Me I'm Doing It Wrong. It's An Industry That's Built Upon Essential Ideas, And Some Of Those Practices Are Abusive.

I'm Not Talking About What Came Later [after The American Underground Punk Scene], Indie Music, Or Whatever You Want To Call It, But The Music That Came Before That - That's An Important Story. So Many Interviews With Musicians Get The Time Or Context Wrong. You Have These Older Bands, Usually Men, Who Tell Stories About "oh, We Got Into This Huge Fight, This Guy Punched That Guy," That's The Wrong Sort Of Story. My View Of The Time Is Truly Pioneering.